Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry was born on August 5th, 1934 in Henry County Kentucky. His literary career consists of writing novels, short stories, and poems. He was born into a farming family of four children and was supported by his father’s jobs as a lawyer and tobacco farmer. He went to secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute and then went on to study English at the University of Kentucky. He later studied creative writing at Stanford University and published his first novel ''Nathan Coulter ''in April of 1960. He has since then published many works and is a recipient of The National Humanities Medal. I especially like Wendell Berry for his poetry. In all of the poems I have read by him I have been struck by something that caused me to like whatever I was reading, no matter the topic. I really enjoy that he has such a wide range of topics for his poetry, so that none are ever too similar. This variety is a very good example for my own poetry. Learning through his example, whenever I write poetry I make sure every one is completely new and fresh so that my poems are more interesting to readers. I also really like his style of writing poetry. I like that he alternates between choppy sentence fragments and complete thoughts whether it is within the same poem or in different ones entirely. In my writing I like to try and do this to, especially choppy fragments, which I think really gives poetry character and distinguishes me as a writer. The way Wendell Berry writes is just so eloquent and simple all at the same time which is something many writers struggle with. He has found the perfect balance in his poetry and writing in general that I truly admire. Wendell Berry has always been someone I look up to in the writing world, and his style will always influence my own work. A Meeting In A Part- Wendell Berry In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: "How you been?" He grins and looks at me. "I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees." Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front- Wendell Berry Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion -- put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie down in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams-Wendell Berry I. The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves, one of the necessities, so they may speak what is true, and have the patience for beauty: the weighted grainfield, the shady street, the well-laid stone and the changing tree whose branches spread above. For want of songs and stories they have dug away the soil, paved over what is left, set up their perfunctory walls in tribute to no god, for the love of no man or woman, so that the good that was here cannot be called back except by long waiting, by great sorrows remembered and to come by invoking the thunderstones of the world, and the vivid air. II. The poem is important, as the want of it proves. It is the stewardship of its own possibility, the past remembering itself in the presence of the present, the power learned and handed down to see what is present and what is not: the pavement laid down and walked over regardlessly--by exiles, here only because they are passing. Oh, remember the oaks that were here, the leaves, purple and brown, falling, the nuthatches walking headfirst down the trunks, crying "onc! onc!" in the brightness as they are doing now in the cemetery across the street where the past and the dead keep each other. To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure. It is dangerous to remember the past only for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get. WRITING PROMPT: Write a poem starting with the sentence "The poem is Important" like in ''In A Motel Parking Lot, Thinking Of Dr. Williams. ''Write it about something related to a rural theme, like so many of Wendell Berry's poems.